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TENNYSON 



BY 

FREDERIC HARRISON 



Neto gorit 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1899 

All rights reserved 



TENNYSON 



BY 

FREDERIC HARRISON 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO.. Ltd. 
1899 

A/i rights reserved 



./I 3 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 

Library of C«ngrft% 
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N0V181899^ 

Reglftor of CopyrfghtSr 

NOV 13 1900 

Copyright, 1899, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Norbjooli ^rras 

J. S. Gushing & Co.— Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A 



i 

K 



CHAPTER I 

TENNYSON 

Once only in the history of our literature in verse, and 
once in prose, has there been seen a royal suzerainty, 
maintained over an entire epoch by a single writer, to be 
compared to that by which Alfred Tennyson has domi- 
nated Victorian poetry. The supremacy held by Alex- 
der Pope over his immediate contemporaries and that held 
by Samuel Johnson over his were as great and far more 
autocratic. But in the half-century that has passed since 
Tennyson became Poet Laureate, his authority over poetic 
form has been paramount, as his superiority to all poets 
of the time is above question or doubt. His flower, to 
adopt his words of proud humility, has truly 'worn a 
crown of light.' Most writers of verse can raise the 
flowers now. They sow it far and wide by every town 
and tower. All have the seed from Alfred Tennyson. 
But the cynic who should call it a weed would be flayed 
alive, as was Marsyas by Apollo. The people, the critics, 
the poets, with one voice continue to cry, ' Splendid is the 
flower ! ' And so say we all. 

This royal prerogative enjoyed by Alfred Tennyson, in 
death as in life, has had some inconveniences, inherent 
in all royalties. It has placed him not only, as they say 
in French academies, /lors concours — above competition, 
above criticism, above discussion — but almost above free 
judgment and honest understanding of his fine qualities 
and his true place in English poetry. No loyal subject 

A I 



2 TENNYSON 

would presume to noise abroad a true and impartial esti- 
mate of the character and endowments of a reigning sov- 
ereign. And so, it has seemed to us all unmannerly, in 
the nineteenth century, to discuss the poems of Tennyson 
with the cool freedom that will certainly be applied to 
them in the next and succeeding centuries. He has never 
been judged as we judge Byron, Shelley, Keats, or Words- 
worth. Since he won his just place as the poet of the 
Victorian era, he has not been treated as mere poet, or 
citizen of the immortal Republic of Letters. He has 
been, like * Mr. Pope' or 'The Doctor,' invested with a 
conventional autocracy, and is spoken of in the language 
of homage, under pain of some form of Ihe-inajcste. It 
is far too early to anticipate the judgment of our succes- 
sors on the place of Tennyson in English poetry. It is 
not to early too speak of him with freedom and honest 
admiration, disdaining any spurious loyalty and the whis- 
pered humbleness which royal personages expect. To 
continue this still would be false homage to our glorious 
literature and to one of the finest poets who adorn its roll. 
As Homer was for all Greece the poet, so for the second 
half of the nineteenth century Tennyson has been 'the 
Poet ' — his devotees spoke of him as * the Bard ' — hold- 
ing a place quite analogous to that of Hugo in France ; 
for he and Victor both 'darkened the wreaths of all who 
claimed to be their peers ' in England as in France. No 
one denies that in England, as in France, there were men 
of genius who have written admirable verse. Vixere fortes 
cum Agamemnone. All men of sense feel the original 
genius of Robert Browning, his unique gift, his subtle 
power. All men of taste feel the magic of Swinburne's 
luscious music, his thrill of passion and scorn. One need 
not go through the list of the sixty-two so-called ' minor 
poets,' — ' some are pretty enough, and some are poor 



TENNYSON 3 

indeed!' Yes! but the cool judgment brings us back to 
this, that though one or two men in these fifty years past 
have given us poems of resplendent genius, and some 
scores have written verses of extreme felicity and grace, 
and many hundreds of men and women have composed 
pieces 'pretty enough,' the prevalent perfume is always 
that of the Tennysonian flower ; the lyre, whoever strikes 
it, gives forth the Tennysonian love-note of its own motion 
— a ^dppLTO'^ he ')(^ophal^ epcora /jlovvov aKel — and Alfred 
Tennyson holds an indisputable laureate crown as com- 
pletely as ever did Victor Hugo in France. 

The crown has been won, partly by the fact that Tenny- 
son embalmed in exquisite verses the current tastes, creeds, 
hopes, and sympathies of the larger part of the reading 
public in our age, but mainly it was won by the supreme 
perfection of his form. In early life he formed a poetic 
style of his own, of quite faultless precision — musical, sim- 
ple, and lucid. And in sixty years of poetic fecundity, his 
style may have gained in energy, but not in precision. It 
was never careless, never uncouth, never (or rarely) ob- 
scure. Every line was polished with the same unerring 
ear and the same infallible taste. In some sixty thousand 
lines it is rare to find a really false rhyme, a truly bungling 
verse, a crude confusion of epithets, or a vile cacophony — 
such ragged stuff as Byron flung off on almost every other 
page, such redundancies as Shelley or Keats would pour 
forth in some hour of delirious rapture, such rank common- 
place as too often offend us in Wordsworth, even when he 
is not droning of malice prepense. Verses so uniformly 
harmonious as those of Tennyson, with their witchery of 
words, yet so clear, so pure, so tender, so redolent of what 
is beautiful in nature, in man, in woman — all this won over 
the entire public that cares for poetry, and it truly deserved 
to win it. 



4 TENNYSON 

Even now full justice has hardly been done to Tenny- 
son's supremacy in form ; or rather, the general reader, 
much as he loves his poems, is not quite aware of the in- 
fallible mastery of language they possess. In the whole 
range of English poetry, Milton alone can be held to show 
an equal or even greater uniformity of polish. Perfection 
and continuity of polish are certainly not the same thing 
as the highest poetry, but they are the note of the consum- 
mate artist. English poetry, for all its splendid achieve- 
ments, is not remarkable for uniform perfection of form, as 
compared with the best poetry of Greece, of Rome, and of 
Italy. Shakespeare himself (or perhaps it is his editors, 
his printers, or his pseudonyms) will at times breakout into 
rant, and he is inordinately prone to indulge in conceits 
and quips. Nearly all our poets have their bad days — be- 
come careless, reckless, or prosy ; lose complete self con- 
trol ; or commit some error of taste, be it in haste, in 
passion, or some morbid condition of the creative fancy. 
Gray always writes like the scholar and critic that he was, 
and Pope always writes with the neatness of a French 
* wit.' But neither can uniformly avoid the commonplace, 
and thus they cannot claim the crown of absolute poetic 
form. Milton, if we can forgive the prolixity of his old 
age, never descends in his eagle's flight from the lofty per- 
fection of form. And more than all other poets, Tennyson, 
if he never soars to such heights as Milton, maintains this 
wonderful equality of measured beat. 

' IN MEMORIAM ' 

This unfaltering truth of form reaches its zenith in In 
Memoriam, which must always remain one of the triumphs 
of English poetry. It would be difficult to name any 
other poem of such length (some three thousand lines) 



TENNYSON 5 

where the rhythm, phrasing, and articulation are so en- 
tirely faultless, so exquisitely clear, melodious, and sure. 
Subtle arguments of philosophy and problems of faith are 
treated with a grace equal to the ease and the lucidity of 
the expression. There is not a poor rhyme, not a forced 
phrase, not a loose or harsh line in the whole series. The 
rhymes, the assonances, the winged epithets are often of 
astonishing brilliancy, and yet they seem to flow unbidden 
from some native well-spring of poetic speech. Such ease, 
certainty, and harmony of tone imply consummate mastery 
of the poet's instrument ; for not a stanza or a line looks 
as if it had cost the poet any labour at all, and yet every 
stanza and line looks as if no labour of his could ever 
make it more perfect. This is indeed a quality only to be 
found in our best poems, of which Milton has given us the 
immortal type. And though In Meinoriam is far from 
being such glorious poetry as Lycidas, it shares with 
Lycidas itself consummate mastery of its own form of 
poetic language. 

One of the main feats of this mastery of form is the 
extraordinarily beautiful and appropriate metre in which 
this poem is cast. Tennyson must be considered to have 
founded the typical metre for this meditative and elegiac 
lyric. Even if it had been occasionally used before in the 
seventeenth century, Tennyson gave it the development 
and perfection it has for us. It has become the natural 
mode for this reflective and mournful poetry ; it is superior, 
no doubt, to the metre of Milton's // Penseroso, or that of 
Mar veil's Thoughts in a Garden, Byron's Elegy on Thyrza, 
or Coleridge's Genevikve. The ease, force, and music of 
this quatrain in Tennyson's hands are wonderful — the 
ease equalling the force, the music equalling the ease. 
As in all meditative poems on a single theme, we find 
stanzas which we could well spare. But the pieces which 



6 TENNYSON 

are best known and have become household words, espe- 
cially the first ten elegies with the famous Introduction^ 
are masterpieces of exquisite versification, several of them 
may stand beside some of the happiest stanzas in our 
poetry. I always think of the opening stanza in No. ii. — 

' Old Yew, which graspest at the stones 
That name the under-lying dead, 
Thy fibres net the dreamless head ; 
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.' — 

as being a miracle of poignant music and simple power. 
And what descriptive rhythm there is in the subtle allitera- 
tions and harmonies of the stanza — ■ 

* But, for the unquiet heart and brain, 
A use in measured language lies ; 
The sad mechanic exercise, 
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.' 

What pathos and reticence in the last lines of No. vi. — 

' To her, perpetual maidenhood. 
And unto me, no second friend.' 

And the tender address to the ship bearing his friend's body 
home in No. x. 

English poetry again has few stanzas which for calm 
beauty can compare with — 

' 'Tis well ; 'tis something ; we may stand 
Where he in English earth is laid, 
And from his ashes may be made 
The violet of his native land.' (xviii.) 

And the famous stanzas — 

' When Lazarus left his charnel-cave.' (xxxi.) 

'Oh yet we trust that somehow good.' (hv.) 

and the other stanzas of this philosophic debate. 



TENNYSON :"'- 7 

Or again the stanzas — 

' I past beside the reverend walls 
In which of old I wore the gown.' (Ixxxvii.) 

'You say, but with no touch of scorn.' (xcvi.) 

' Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.' (cvi.) 

These are the household words — almost to us to-day 
the commonplaces of Tennyson. And the public is so far 
right that these, it may be hackneyed, lines are in grace, 
simplicity, and music amongst the best masterpieces of 
English lyric. 

A question still remains. With all the charm and 
pathos of these stanzas, with all that unfailing workman- 
ship surpassed perhaps by Milton alone, does hi Memoriam, 
even in form, reach the topmost empyrean of lyric to which 
one or two of our poets have risen. Memory echoes back 
to our ear a passionate couplet, it may be, of Shakespeare's 
Sonnets, a dazzling gem from Lycidas, another from Shel- 
ley's Ode to the West Wind, another from Wordsworth's 
Ode on Immortality. 

Listen to this — 

' Yet in these thoughts myself almost despairing 
Haply I think on thee — and then my state, 
Like to the lark at break of day arising 

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.' 

Here is lyrical passion in all its delirium ! — 

' To me, fair Friend, you never can be old.' 
< But thy eternal summer shall not fade.' 
' When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, 
I summon up remembrance of things past.' 

All this rings in our ears like the momory of Beethoven's 
Adelaida, sung by the great te^iore robusto. 



8 TENNYSON '\,] 

Or again, we think of Milton's Nativity — 

' The trumpet spake not to the armed throng ; 

And kings sat still with awful eye.' ) 

or we recall Lycidas — 

'■ He must not float upon his watery bier 
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, 
Without the mead of some melodious tear.' 

Does In Memoriam, with all its ' curious felicity ' of 
phrase its perfect chiselling, its stately music in the minor 
key — does it touch the rapture and the magic of these un- 
forgotten chords of supreme poetry } For my own part, I 
cannot feel that it does, even in such exquisite stanzas as 
those cited above. 

I think again of Shelley's West Wind — 

' O thou 
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, \ 

Each like a corpse within its grave, until 
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow 
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth.' 

Here is the Muse of Hellas who inspired the eVea Trrepoevra 
of Pindar and of Sappho. 

And again I think of Wordsworth's Ode — 

' There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream. 
The earth, and every common sight, 
To me did seem 
Apparelled in celestial light, 
The glory and the freshness of a dream.' j 

and so on down to — 

' To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.' 



TENNYSON 9 

It is true that the stanzas of In Memoriam are more 
ingenious, more delicately chiselled, more subtle in art, 
than these Wordsworthian truisms : but they do not alto- 
gether rouse one with such a ring ; they do not ravish the 
soul and stamp the memory so deeply ; they are not quite 
so spontaneous, so unaffected, so inimitable ; and there- 
fore I feel that they fail to mount into the topmost air of 
poetic rapture. 

But saying this, we do not diminish the laureate's 
crown. /;/ Menioriam must long remain one of our 
noblest poems, along with Gray's Elegy, also a little aca- 
demic — a poem, it must be allowed, too long and in 
places rather too obvious, if not trivial. In Menioriam 
will stand along with Coleridge's Ode to Love, Keats' Ode 
to Autimin, Marvell's Odes and Elegies —s^wy^^xxox per- 
haps to all of these as it is, but still wanting in that amp- 
lest breath of the Delphic God. Indeed, with all its art, 
melody, and charm, we see from time to time in In Menio- 
riam a little too visibly 'the sad mechanic exercise,' which 
is the inevitable result of too rigid and prolonged devotion 
to the uses of 'measured language.' To Chaucer, to 
Shakespeare, to Spenser — nay, to Shelley and Burns, to 
Byron and Keats, poetry never could be for an hour 
a mechanical exercise. They all, like Shelley's Skylark, 
would pour their 'full heart in profuse strains of unpre- 
meditated art.' 

THEOLOGY 

So far we have been considering the lyrical form of In 
Menioriam — a form which, if never quite reaching in 
rapture the supreme bursts of lyric, is after Milton's the 
most faultlessly chiselled verse in our language. We pass 
to its substance : and we will say at once that in concep- 
tion it is not equal to its form. Yet in conception it is a 



lO TENNYSON 

noble poem. The account of its origin and its long and 
gradual construction in detached elegies extending over 
sixteen years, as explained in Hallam Tennyson's valuable 
Memoir, fully disposes of the adverse criticisms that were 
once passed on the scheme of the poem. The sudden 
death of Arthur Hallam, and his wonderful promise, gifts, 
influence, and so forth, form the occasion, the overture, the 
motive of In Memoriain ; but these things do not at all form 
the main substance of the whole. The early death of Ed- 
ward King was the occasion of Lycidas ; but we do not 
hold Milton literally bound to his belief that his young 
friend had left no peer on earth. Nor do we take every 
phrasein Shakespeare's Sonnets or Byron's CJiilde Harold 
as absolute autobiography and not poetry. 

As the poet himself tells us, /;/ Memoriain is a Divina 
Commedia, a meditative poem, wherein thoughts on death, 
man's destiny, future life, and the purposes of the Creator 
gradually lead up to faith in His goodness, and a sober 
sense of happiness in Resignation and Love. This makes 
it a real Divina Commedia — a bona-fide effort to 'assert 
eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men.' 
But then In Memoriam is a Divine Comedy, or a Paradise 
Lost, longo intervallo. Putting aside the fact that Tenny- 
son is not a Dante or a Milton, and that his graceful ele- 
gies do not pretend to vie with the mighty imagination of 
these immortal visions, can it be said that either the the- 
ology or the philosophy of In Memoriam are new, original, 
with an independent force and depth of their own ? Surely 
not. They are exquisitely graceful restatements of the 
current theology of the broad-Churchman of the school of 
F. D. Maurice and Jowett — a combination of Maurice's 
somewhat illogical piety with Jowett's philosophy of mysti-I 
fication. As the Darwinian and evolutionary theories dis- 
cussed are not the original discoveries of the poet in 



TENNYSON 1 1 

natural science, so the theological and metaphysical prob- 
lems are not original contributions to theology or phi- 
losophy. They are an admirably tuneful versification of 
ideas current in the religious and learned world. 

Opinions on the poetical value of Tennyson's theology 
as a poet may be formed by any serious mind, apart from 
private convictions on the theology itself. Auguste Comte 
expressed unbounded admiration for the Divine Comedy 
and the Paradise Lost, as he did for Thomas a Kempis 
and Bossuet. So every one of fair mind would rejoice 
to recognise intellectual grasp, fused by poetic imagina- 
tion, in Tennyson's /;/ Memoriam, if he could find in it 
central ideas treated with native power and new insight. 
A materialist of feeling can enter heartily into the pro- 
found power of Job, of the City of God, of the Pilgrim's 
Progress, of Bossuet's Universal History, little as he be- 
lieves any dogmas they contain. But does In Memoriam 
teach anything, or transfigure any idea which was not 
about that time common form with F. D. Maurice, with 
Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Mr. 
Ruskin, and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops Westcott and 
Boyd Carpenter.^ It is true that Tennyson clothes with 
exquisite form, and presents almost as so much original 
thought, the ideas which in 1850 were floating about in 
the mental atmosphere of Oxford and Cambridge men ; 
he had common ground with the liberal clergy of that 
date ; and also he was in touch with many general ideas 
of Herschel, Owen, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall. 

He embodied these discussions, theories, and pious 
hopes of broad-Churchmen in lovely phrases ; but he has 
in no sense added to them, nor did he give them new 
power. He did nothing to make a Theodicee of his own, 
as Dante did for the Catholic creed, and as Milton did 
for the Puritan creed. Nothing of the kind, hi Memo- 



12 TENNYSON 

riam, with all its devotional mysticism, contains no solid 
thought that we do not find in F. Robertson's Sermons, 
in Jowett's Essays, in Dr. Martinean's philosophy, and 
we may now add, in Arthur Balfour's PJiilosopJiic Doubts 
and Foundations of a Creed. (Heaven save the mark !) — 

' Our little systems have their day/ 
'• We have but faith : we cannot know.' 

and much to that effect. Well, but we need to know 
a little more ; and Tennyson only again, for the thou- 
sandth time, re-echoes most musically our sense of igno- 
rance. For a century, ten thousand pulpits hav^e been 
echoing the same cry, as have hundreds of beautiful 
essays full of pious hopes, and vague moanings about 
something 'behind the veil.' Popes, Caliphs, martyrs, 
mystics, Bunyan, Swedenborg, and many more have their 
ideas about what we shall find * behind the veil.' But 
we get no further. 

Together with /;/ Memoriani — what was indeed the 
prelude, almost the first rough sketch of In Memoriam, 
equal to it in metrical skill and also in meditative power 
— we must take the Tzvo Voices. It might well be urged 
that the Tzvo Voices, in the astonishing art with which 
its most exacting stanza is managed, in the mastery in 
which a subtle argument is embodied in terse poetic 
form, in its richness of metaphysical suggestion, forms 
the greatest triumph of Tennyson's profounder poems. 
Our language has few finer examples of argumentative 
verse. But has the argument the stamp of original genius, 
of new and pregnant thought .? Surely not. The ideas 
are those which have been worked out in a hundred ser- 
mons and essays by able men who, feeling the force of 
many unsolved problems of metaphysics and of science, 
still would find aesthetic, moral, and psychological grounds 



TENNYSON 1 3 

for * faintly trusting the larger hope.' Nor can it be denied 
that throughout this poem, as throughout In Menioriam — 
as in all the metaphysical poems — there runs the under- 
tone of scepticism, of absence at any rate of entire mental 
assurance and solid belief, as distinct from hope — 

'A hidden hope, the voice replied.' 
'To feel, although no tongue can prove.'' 
'• Believing, where we cannot prove.' ; 

' We have but faith ; we cannot know.' 
'- An infant crying in the night.' 
'And with no language but a cry.' 
' Behind the veil, behind the veil.' 
'There lives more faith in honest doubt. 
Believe me, than in half the creeds ! ' 

No one can deny that all this is exquisitely beautiful ; 
that these eternal problems have never been clad in such 
inimitable grace. Nor do we doubt that they embody a 
train of thought very rife in the cultured intellect of our 
time. But the train of thought is essentially that with 
which ordinary English readers had been made familiar by 
F- D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Dr. Martineau, Ecce 
Homo, Hypatia, and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr. Drum- 
mond, and many valiant companies of Septeui Contra Dia- 
bohivi. The argument in substance is, that as Science is 
still unable to explain the Universe, and as Metaphysics 
still nurse their abysmal problems, we should faintly trust 
the larger hope. Orthodox Churchmen say this larger 
hope is to be found in the Anglican Prayer Book ; ortho- 
dox Methodists say it is only to be read in the Bible ; 
Catholics say it is in the living voice of the Church; broad- 
Churchmen find it in various beautiful and somewhat nebu- 
lous visions ; but of all believers in the Gospel, they hold 
to it most ' faintly ' and with the largest mixture of per- 
plexity and hesitation. No form of the ' larger hope ' 



14 TENNYSON 

admits more readily of poetic expression than does this. 
And Tennyson, in many thousand lines, has given it a 
shape supremely typical of nineteenth-century culture. 
But he caught up, he did not create, the ideas ; and his 
most melodious transfiguration of this half-sceptical piety 
does not give him the title of philosophic genius, nor as 
the living inspiration of the higher problems of our age. 
He gave it a voice, he did not give it a faith. 

In later years the polemical tone of mind rather grew on 
him, and he wrote several pieces, the substantial argument 
of which did not rise above the level of the popular ser- 
mons, essays, and novels which confute modern philosophy 
and science. Pamphleteering, even in defence of the Chris- 
tian verities — much less in advocacy of the ' hidden hope' 
or 'honest doubt' — is seldom poetry, and the manifest 
inferiority of these later pieces is proof that the poet was 
on a wrong scent. Such queer things as that called Despair, 
with its elephantine lines of sixteen syllables, belong to the 
large group of theological burlesques whereof the Mighty 
Atom presents the most absurd type. Another such piece 
is the oddity called Vastness, with its twenty-syllable lines, 
in the manner of Walt Whitman, but hardly so rhythmical 
as his Leaves of Grass. Lovers of Tennyson's poetry can 
only regret these controversial pieces which betray a rather 
shallow irritability of religious spirit, and form a blot on 
his otherwise true poetic judgment. 

But though Tennyson did at last deviate into utterly 
unpoetical sermonising, though his great meditative poems 
followed, rather than created, the current ideas of his 
time, he amply deserved the immense influence he pos- 
sessed over the higher religious world. It may be needful 
now to remind his less reasonable admirers that the poetic 
expression of current ideas does not fulfil the highest 
function of the poet. Burns distinctly created the deep 



TENNYSON 1 5 

enthusiasm of all true Scots for their race in all types of 
its simple manliness. Wordsworth created the passion of 
modern Englishmen for communion with Nature. Byron 
filled Europe with sympathy for historic Rome and Greece. 
We cannot claim for Tennyson any such creative influence 
over men. He did for the religious thought of English 
Christians in far grander verse, as it was a far nobler type of 
religious thought, what Young did in his Night Thoughts for 
the religious thought of the last century. From the philo- 
sophic point of view, In Memoriam is a kind of glorified 
CJiristiaii Year. It has made Tennyson the idol of the 
Angelican clergyman — the world in which he was born 
and the world in which his whole life was ideally past — 
the idol of all cultured youth and of all aesthetic women. 
It is an honourable post to fill. He was in all things a 
true and illustrious poet. Only, his devotees must re- 
member that he does not reach the rank of Shakespeare, 
of Milton, of Chaucer, of Spenser — nay, it may be doubted 
if his ultimate place in our literature will at all overtop 
that of Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, or Shelley ; men who, 
with all their defects and all their limitations, did, by origi- 
nal ideas fresh from their own spirit and not at all adapted 
from contemporary thinkers, give a new impulse to the 
mind of their age. 

*THE IDYLLS ' 

Hitherto we have considered Tennyson's religious and 
philosophical pieces (especially In Memoriam, the most 
most perfect of his poems), because his claim to rank as the 
supreme poet of the nineteenth century must rest on this if 
on anything. That he is the supreme poet of the Victorian 
era is too clear for question. The chief poems after 
In Memoriam are the Idylls of the King, occupying more 
than one-fourth of the entire collection of Poems: The 



1 6 TENNYSON 

Princess, filling about one-twelfth of the collecte ! Woj'ks ; 
and Maitd, not half The Princess in length. The Idylls of the 
King are the best known and most rea 1 of the larger 
poems, and in some points of view are the most impor- 
tant of all Tennyson's works, inasmuch as they are far the 
largest, and covered in execution nearly forty years of the 
poet's life. The twelve books, of over ii,ooo, lines are 
in form an epic ; they display nearly all the poet's great 
qualities in turn, except the didactic and the purely lyrical. 
They are a wonderful monument of sustained and chastened 
fancy, of noble ideals, and of delicious music. 

A volume would not suffice to dilate on all the beauties 
of the Idylls, the romantic halo of chivalry, the glow of 
colour, the sonorous clang of the battle scenes, the tender pa- 
thos of the love scenes, the tragedy of the catastrophe, the 
final threnody, when ' on the mere the wailing died away.' 
A volume would not suffice to expatiate on all these graces ; 
and for every lover of poetry, for every reader of taste, 
such a volume, or even such an essay, is wholly needless. 

A far more difficult task is to class these fascinating 
poems. To what order of poetry do they belong ; do they 
fulfil all their aim; are they an unqualified success.-' 
Clearly the Idylls do not form a real epic. There is too 
much pure fancy, too much sentiment, too much of the 
drawing-room and the lecture-hall — in a word, it is nearer 
to a modern romance than to an antique epic. It is poe- 
try, exquisite poetry, but no more an epic than Shelley's 
Revolt of Islam is an epic, or than his Hellas is a tragedy. 
The words in which Shelley describes his purpose in the 
Revolt of Islam curiously fit the Idylls of the King. ' I 
have sought to enlist the harmony of metrical language, 
the ethereal combinations of the fancy, the rapid and sub- 
tle transitions of human passion, all those elements which 
essentially compose a poem, in the cause of a liberal and 



TENNYSON 1 7 

comprehensive morality.' That is a perfectly legitimate 
motive of a poem. And in a certain degree that is what 
Tennyson has done in his Idylls, making his plot infinitely 
more real, more inteligible, and more interesting than that 
of Shelley's Islam. 

In choosing as his theme a well-known romance, adapt- 
ing and developing a very grand old prose-poem, Tenny- 
son obtained the great advantage of incidents living, 
thrilling, and even familiar, and thus avoiding the cloudy 
symbolism of Shelley's scheme, which makes Islam a 
closed book to the ordinary public. But then Tennyson 
fell on the other horn of the dilemma, which was the risk 
of travestying the old romance, so that it became more or 
less incongruous, unnatural, and impossible. Lovers of 
exquisite verse and of romantic chivalry, who know noth- 
ing either of historic chivalry or of the mediaeval romances, 
do not feel the incongruity ; and they form the grea! ma- 
jority of the Tennysonian public. But from the point of 
view of actual history and the real Arthurian myth, the fill- 
ing the old bottle of Malory with the new wine of Alfred 
Tennyson is an inevitable danger. Lancelot of the Lake 
is transformed into a sort of Sir Charles Grandison in 
plate armour ; King Arthur becomes a courtier's portrait 
of the late Prince Consort. Elaine is a new Virginie with- 
out her * Paul,' and Queen Guinevere is a magnificent 
* grande dame ' of Versailles, with a secret. It is all too 
much of a pageant or * revival ' in mediaeval character, and 
suggests reminiscences of the Eglinton Tournament and 
the stage Shakespeare. 

We all feel the wonderful skill with which the local 
colour is maintained, the glamour of antique setting, the 
tone of mingled chivalry and barbaric rage in the warriors 
of the Dragon and of the White Horse. But this very real- 
ism of painting increases the incongruity of the whole. 



1 8 TENNYSON 

These Berserker blood-feasts, these eternal jousts and 
pageants, these murderous conspiracies and feuds, will not 
assimilate with the Grand Monarque courtliness of King 
Arthur, the Quixotic heroisms and sublimated amours of 
Lancelot, the unearthly passion of the love-lorn maid of 
Astolat. If the whole poem were cast in a purely ideal 
world, we could accept it as pure fantasy. But it is not quite 
an ideal world. Therein lies the difificulty. The scene, 
though not of course historic, has certain historic sugges- 
tions and characters. It is a world far more real than that 
of Spenser's Faery Queen, or Malory's Morte Darthur, or 
Coleridge's Christabel. So far as concerns the scene, and 
the external surroundings, the costumes and the landscapes, 
we feel these to be a plausible field for a chivalric romance — 
full of fancy and of poetry, no doubt, but still plausible, in- 
telligible, and coherent. Various episodes, combats, and 
actions take place upon this scene of a kind consistent 
with it, and poetically natural to romances of chivalry. 
Whole books read almost like incidents we might find in 
Joinville or Froissart done into exquisite poetry. 

But then, in the midst of so much realism, the knights, 
from Arthur downwards, talk and act in ways with which 
we are familiar in modern ethical and psychological novels ; 
but which are as impossible in real mediaeval knights as a 
Bengal tiger or a Polar bear would be in a drawing-room. 
The women, from the Queen to Elaine and Enid, behave, 
not like dames and damsels of mediaeval romance, but with 
the spiritual delicacy and all the soul-bewildering casuistry 
we study and enjoy in Hypatia, Romola, Middlemarch, or 
Helbeck of Bannisdale. The Idylls of the King are an 
amalgam of mediaeval romance and analytical novel. Both 
mediaeval romance and analytical novel may be made full 
of interest and power. But the attempt to fuse them into 
one poem is beyond the art of any imagination. 



TENNYSON 1 9 

A Still greater difficulty beset the poet in his Arthurian 
epic, in the fact that he does not invent his plot and his 
characters as Milton, Spenser, and Shelley do in their 
dream-worlds ; but he has simply modernised and bowdler- 
ised a noble old epic which needs no decoration from us. 
Malory's Morte DartJuir is a grand poem itself ; consistent 
as a whole, intelligible, and natural as a mediaeval romance. 
Crammed with wild incident, as is Malory's epic — with 
witchcraft, magic and miracle, blood and battle, lust and 
rape, villainy and treason — knights and dames behave 
accordingly. They love, fight, slay, rob, joust, and do 
deeds of * derring-do,' and of true love, legal or illegal, like 
hot-blooded men and women in fierce times, before an idea 
had arisen in the world of * reverencing conscience,' of 
'leading sweet lives,' of 'keeping down the base in man,' 
'teaching high thought,' with 'amiable words and courtli- 
ness,' and so forth. Malory's original Morte DartJmr is 
plausible as a mediaeval romance, with all its devilry and 
angeltry, its infinite transformation scenes and supernat, 
uralisms, its fierce loves and hates, its blood and crime 
and with all its fantastic ideals of * Honour' and of * Love.' 
But in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, the devils and most 
of the angels disappear, the supernaturalism shrinks to a 
few incidents ; there is a good deal of fighting, but the 
knights are almost too polite to kill each other; if the 
ladies do Qomn-iit fanx pas, their artifices and compunctions 
are those of the novel or the stage. And so the whole 
fierce, lusty epic gets emasculated into a moral lesson, 
as if it were to be performed in a drawing-room by an 
academy of young ladies. 

No one could complain of using the elements of a poem, 
as Shelley says, *in the cause of a liberal and comprehen- 
sive morality.' But the lovers of Malory do complain of 
having his rough-hewn romance modernised and bowdler- 



20 TENNYSON 

ised into an incongruous medley. It is not fair to the old 
romancer, and the result is an hermaphrodite kind of work, 
in spite of all the winning gracefulness which is the pecul- 
iarity of such decadent art. The Nibelungen Epic pre- 
sents to us a mass of tragic horror which suits the fierce 
war-song it is, and the mythical age in which it is cast. 
But we should not care to have Siegfried transmuted into 
a model prince with serious ideas about the social question, 
Chrimhild and Brunhild become stately royal ladies with a 
past, and Hagen and Folker exchanging moral sentiments 
over the corpse of King Gunther. Mr. Pope translated 
the Iliad into Queen Anne heroics, but happily he did not 
attempt a paraphrase of it in the manner of the Rape of 
the Lock. The Idylls of the King are a delicious series of 
poetic tableaux ; and would be pure poetry, if we could 
forget the incongruity of making belted knights with fairy 
mothers talking modern morality — noble and musical as 
the morality is — and if we could forget the fierce clang of 
battle, and all the rude and unholy adventures that Malory 
rehearsed once for all in his inimitable mother-tongue. 

So far it seemed necessary to face the weaker side of 
the Idylls of the Kiiig, because in the conspiracy of silence 
into which Tennyson's just fame has hypnotised the 
critics, it is bare honesty to admit defects. xA.nd the 
frank statement of these is forced upon judicious lovers 
of the laureate's work by the extravagant tone of some of 
his admirers. Gushing curates and aesthetic young ladies 
have been heard to talk as if the Idylls of the King formed 
a far grander poem than Spenser's Faerie Qneen, or 
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, nay, stood on a level with the 
Paradise Lost. But when the incongruity of his plan and 
the anomalies of his characters are once frankly admitted, 
we can all join in acclaiming the splendour of the execu- 
tion of Tennyson's largest poem. Elaine, Guinevere, and 



TENNYSON 2 1 

the Passing of Arthur, in particular, contain poetry as 
exquisite in picture, in music, in pathos, as any in our 
language. The speeches of Arthur, of Lancelot, of Pelleas, 
and of many more, are truly noble, eloquent, and epic in 
themselves, if we forget for a moment the acts and the 
other conditions of these heroes in the rest of the poem. 
The final parting of Arthur and Guinevere, undoubtedly 
the most dramatic and heroic scene Tennyson ever painted, 
is a grand conception, if detached from the Round Table 
story, and if treated simply as a modern (or undated) epi- 
sode between false wife and magnanimous husband in his 
agony of shame, wrath, and sorrow. 

If the poet had been bidden by some royal taskmaster 
to perform the unnatural task of converting episodes from 
the Arthurian cycle into poems fit for the young person of 
modern culture, it could not have been accomplished with 
more consummate beauty and faultless delicacy. And in 
this connection it is significant that the better judgment 
gives the chief crown of poetry in the whole collection to 
the original Morte d' ArtJmr, beginning — 



and ending 



' So all day long the noise of battle rolled,' 



And on the mere the wailing died away. 



These noble lines, the most perfect in form and the 
simplest in conception of the Idylls, were written in early 
youth, and are an amazing triumph of precocious art. In 
them we have an ideal of mystical kinghood and a world of 
pure fancy, wonder, and weird myth, undisturbed by any 
incongruous tale of Arthur's blindness and Guinevere's 
falseness. One used to hear it said at Oxford in the fifties, 
that if the Morte d' Arthur of the early Poe^ns was ever 
completed, it would be the grandest epic in our language. 



22 TENNYSON 

Alas ! this was not to be fulfilled. It still remains the 
only fragment of real epic in the Idylls ; the only fragment, 
because simple, unalloyed with incongruous plot, untainted 
with modern romance, without ethical or psychological 
subtleties and graces. 

*THE princess' AND * MAUD ' 

As In Memoriam is certainly the most perfect of Tenny- 
son's longer poems, and as the Idylls of the King form the 
most important part or his work, by the scale, variety, and 
elaboration of the whole series, so we must count The 
Princess and Ma?id 2iS his most characteristic and typical 
achievements. The Princess was published in 1847, when 
the poet was thirty-eight; Maud in 1855, when he was 
forty-six. In TJie Princess Tennyson chose a subject in 
which all his genius found full play, which was entirely 
within all his resources. It was far lighter in design, 
much better fitted for his wonderful gifts of sweetness and 
grace, than the wild legends of the Arthurian cycle. It 
was no epic — not even an 'epyll,' or cross, we may say, 
between the epic and idyll. It was, as it was entitled, 
a ' Medley.' It was a fantastic idyllic romance, with a 
gentle undertone of moral purpose, not without a great 
deal of modern 'sentiment,' and some graceful and lady- 
like banter. Here was a subject which was curiously in 
harmony with the poet's temperament and exquisite refine- 
ment. He was not called upon to build up an epic, or 
even an episode in an epic — a thing for which he had 
(possibly knew that he had) no real mission. But the 
fantastic romance, cast in an undefined ideal world, and 
interfused with an ethical evangel — an idyll of chivalry 
told to a bevy of young ladies in a drawing-room, with 
an eye to their moral improvement — here was a field in 



TENNYSON 23 

which Tennysoit had no superior or equal. It may not 
have been the highest field of a great poet's aspiration, 
but, in its own line, the poem is a bewitching success. 
The result is a piece of unbounded popularity, the charms 
of which satisfy the most scrupulous criticism as com- 
pletely as they enthrall the whole reading public. 

Maud is, in some ways, the most original of all Tenny- 
son's conceptions. It is the first of those he chose for 
reading to his friends. It contains the most complex and 
subtle plot of any of the pieces which he constructed 
for himself. As an elaborate psychological analysis, he 
never produced anything on such a scale. The method 
of its composition — from the catastrophe back to the ori- 
gin — as it is explained in the Memoir, is very singu- 
lar and characteristic. The poem certainly contains the 
poet's most subtle insight into the human heart and brain. 
It contains also some of his most stirring eloquence, his 
fiercest passion, and undoubtedly much of his most en- 
trancing melodies. The contrast between the dark mys- 
teries of its opening — * the dreadful hollow,' 'dabbled with 
blood-red heath,' * the ghastly pit,' 'the red-ribbed ledges 
drip with a silent horror of blood ' — and then the passing 
to the 'Birds in the high Hall-garden,' 'go not, happy 
day,' and so on to the miraculous music of ' Come into the 
garden, Maud ' — this contrast is profoundly impressive. 

But with all the originality of Maud as a psychologic 
study, and all its luscious music, it is not a complete suc- 
cess. We must agree with Ruskin's complaint, amidst all 
his admiration, that he did not quite like the 'sad story' 
and the 'wild kind of versification.' The story is more 
than sad : it is painful, it is ghastly, without being quite 
tragic. It is never pleasant to hear one recounting the 
phases of his own mania. And the wildly Bacchantic 
prosody of the strophes, though often beautiful, and always 



24 TENNYSON 

skilful, produces the efffct of a pot pourri in a poem of 
such length — some 1500 lines. But there is a more 
serious criticism to be made. The story is a psychologic 
romance, more fit for prose than for verse. In poetry it 
is rather too analytic, complex, and introspective for entire 
enjoyment and ready comprehension. And the romance 
itself is gruesome and somewhat revolting, as a basis for 
so much fancy and such delicate melodies. It is slightly 
incongruous, as if the story of Eugene Aram were set to 
music for the flute. Subtle mysteries of crime and lunacy 
are endurable in an analytic novel, but do not tell well or 
even intelligibly in dulcet lyrics. Tens of thousands of 
men and women imagine themselves to love Maud as a 
poem, with very faint understanding of its mysterious plot 
and its morbid psychology. 

Tennyson hardly ever wrote without a moral purpose of 
some kind. But his attempt to weave into a gastly story 
of crime, avarice, and insanity a fervid hymn to the moral 
value of national War, was, to say the least, a little irrele- 
vant. It may have been right to denounce the Manchester 
school of politicians and to glorify the Crimean War as an 
Ethical Crusade in defence of the ' higher life,' but it pre- 
vented many worthy people from doing justice to the 
beauties of the poem. They would have thought it poison- 
ous rant to preach, that the only way to cure the sin and 
fraud of great cities was to embark in a big war, were it 
not that they found this remarkable evangel of the nine- 
teenth century after Christ put into the mouth of a some- 
what crazy 'degenerate,' with memories of a blurred and 
bloody past. 

LYRICS ARD IDYLLS 

It is a far happier task to turn to the more distinctly 
lyrical work of Tennyson — that whereon his permanent 



TENNYSON 25 

fame must abide. From the early Claribel to the final 
Crossing tJie Bar, separated by some sixty years of produc- 
tion, Tennyson's pure lyrics stand in the front rank of 
English lyrical achievement. It is needless to dilate on 
what every one has admired — man, woman, and child; 
scholar, simple, critic, or general public. Nor has the 
praise and delight in this exquisite music been excessive 
or mistaken. It is a field where the student of Sappho 
and Catullus join hands with the girl in the schoolroom in 
unbounded admiration. The marvel is that these songs, 
with their luscious melody, their ./Eolic chiselling of phrase, 
their simple completeness, were the work of so young a 
poet, came forth full-fledged from the ^^^. That such 
pieces as Mariana, Oriaiia, Fatiina, the Merman and Mer- 
maid, should be thrown off by an unknown youth is 
amazing. That such a genius for melody should have been 
retained to the age of eighty, and produce in old age songs 
like The Throstle and Early Spring, is almost more amaz- 
ing. The wealth as well as the beauty of Tennyson's 
lyrical productions places him in the foremost rank of our 
lyrists — strong as our literature has been for many cen- 
turies in that form of poetry. 

The unanimous voice of the public has been right in 
fastening on the best of these lyrics, so that they have 
become household words, as familiar as those of Milton 
or Burns. TJie Miller s DangJiter, The Lotos-Eaters, Break, 
break, break, the Dream of Fair Women, Locksley Hall, The 
Light Brigade, The Revenge, are equally popular, and in 
various modes deserve their immense vogue. Above all 
others are the songs in The Brook, in TJie Princess, and in 
Maud. Of them all, no doubt, the songs in The Princess 
are the most bewitching: 'The splendour falls on castle 
walls ' — ' Tears, idle tears ' — ' O swallow, swallow ' — 
'Now sleeps the crimson petal' — and lastly, 'Come down, 



26 TENNYSON 

O maid,' with its miraculous couplet, 'The moan of doves' 
— assuredly the most felicitous bit of imitative music in 
modern poetry, perhaps even in all English poetry. 

Even whilst under the spell of these siren chants, we 
must not suffer ourselves to be drawn into any false rap- 
tures. The lyrics, with all their charm, hardly rise to the 
Olympian radiance of a lyric by Sappho or Sophocles. 
They do not move us like Lycidas or Shakespeare's Songs ; 
no ! nor like such ballads as the Twa Corbies or the Land 
<?' the Leal.JoJin Anderson, O Waly Waly, or Fair Helen. 
They have not that audible ring that we hear in Shelley's 
Skylark, and several others of Shelley's best lyrics. Nor 
have they that inexplicable pathos of Lovelace's AltJiea, 
and some Scottish songs of Burns and Scott. The music 
of Tennyson's loveliest songs is somewhat languorous. It 
is — 

'■ Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, 
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes.' 

Exquisite, exquisite! but a little cloying — the true moan 
of melancholy lotos-eaters ! In all these songs we faint 
under the dulcet sounds of harp and flute, but we miss the 
trumpet and bassoon. We miss the lilt of Scots WJia Hae, 
of A man's a man for a' that, the passion of Duncan Gray, 
the indescribable enthralment of the Ancient Mariner. 
No one thinks of putting Tennyson's place in poetry be- 
low that of Burns, Scott, or Coleridge. But even in his 
happiest lyrics, there is some want of the clarion note 
that they from time to time could sound. 

We do not altogether hear Tennyson shout forth these 
verses : we rather see him piecing them together, with con- 
summate art, but without that ungovernable tempest of 
feeling which marks the highest lyric, so that speech 
seems to fail the poet, and he bursts into unrestrainable 



TENNYSON 2/ 

song. Tennyson's lyrics are all exquisitely melodious and 
marvellously worked. But the very melody and the work 
somewhat lessen our sense of their spontaneous inspira- 
tion. And of all forms of poetry, lyric most needs the 
sense of being inspired song, inevitable outpouring of 
heart 

The essence of lyric \^ feeling — passion, the thrill of 
joy, anguish, or strife. No one can dispute the feeling of 
Tennyson's lyrics ; but it is usually clothed in such subtle 
graces of fancy, in such artful cadences, in such enamelled 
colouring, that it strikes the imagination more than the 
heart. We feel this even in such an exquisite ballad as 
Edward Gray ; which, with all its pathos, is somewhat too 
pretty, too artful, too modern. The songs are not quite 
simple, and the expression of feeling must be simple. 
Burns's songs are inverbal refinement mere peasant's 
catches as compared with Tennyson's subtle modulations. 
But they have the thrill which rings through and through 
us. We Jiear them sung, even as we do in such immortal 
songs as 'Take, Oh ! take those lips away,' or ' Come away, 
come away, Death ! ' In Moliere's Misanthrope^ Alceste 
justly prefers * J'aime mieux ma mie, O gai !' to the most 
ingenious sonnet. That is the supreme charm of Shake- 
speare's songs — ' Full fathom five thy Father lies ! ' 'Tell 
me where is Fancy bred ! ' — a child can follow this ; might 
even utter it. No words could be more natural and easy. 
And this ring from the heart's chords is in Burns's songs, 
from * O, my Luve is like a red, red rose' down to the 
tipsy fun of 'The Deil cam fiddling through the town.' 
Scott, who is only a very fine poet in a few songs, has this 
incommunicable cantabile, which Shelley often, Byron and 
Wordsworth and Keats once or twice, have touched. Ten- 
nyson's lyrics, as we all feel, have exquisite music ; but it 
is the music of recitation, of memory, of thought, rather 



28 TENNYSON 

than of song. They are too luscious, too brocaded to be 
sung. But if they miss this thrill which forces forth the 
voice, they gain in poetic colour, in complex harmony, in 
translucence. Thousands of lovers of The Princess linger 
over the melting cadences of the songs therein — 'Tears, 
idle tears,' *0 swallow, swallow,' 'Now sleeps the crimson 
petal,' 'Come down, O maid' — without knowing that these 
lovely lines are composed in heroic blank verse — the same 
metre as Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. They wring 
us like the Ciijns aniviavi of Rossini's Stabat Mater. Hut, 
like that wonderful dirge, they are a little too languorous 
— have too much inorbidezza for great art. 

But if the songs, with all their * linked sweetness long 
drawn out,' with all that ' melting voice through mazes 
running,' speak to us with the mind rather than the voice, 
Tennyson has appropriated a form of lyric poem which is 
peculiarly his own, and in which he is supreme. This is 
the real idyll of which CEnone is the type. The Idylls of 
the King are not true idylls. Edmund Lushington wished 
to call them epylls, or little epics. They are not epics, 
because they have not the note of sustained heroism — 
what Matthew Arnold called ' the grand manner ' ; they 
have too much oi genre, of sentiment, of modern colouring 
and ethical reflection. On the other hand, they are not 
idylls, because they have too much action and pure narra- 
tion, too much of romantic drama, and too much allegory 
and moral lesson. But Qinone is a true idyll — not too 
long, a single incident of rural simplicity, a beautiful pic- 
ture of an ideal world presented in romantic setting. It 
isa romance, based on an Homeric legend, but saturated 
with modern ethos. It is like a delicious Correggio — say, 
the Venns, Mars, and Cupid of the Louvre, with its won- 
derful chiaroscuro and sunlight playing through the leaves 
over the warm and palpitating flesh. The Venus of Cor- 



TENNYSON 29 

reggio is not in the least Homer's Aphrodite any more 
than Mars is Ares : they are deities of Olympus as im- 
agined by Renascence fancy. So the CEnone of Tennyson 
is no nymph of the Iliad, any more than the evil-hearted 
Paris is the son of the epical Priam : much less do Here 
and Pallas talk like the Queen and Virgin of the Epic. 
The whole conception is an Hellenic myth in a setting of 
modern romance. So the idylls of Theocritus, of Virgil, of 
Tasso, of Shakespeare present to us some tale of antique 
simplicity with a colouring entirely that of the poet's own. 
It is a legitimate and exquisite form of art, like the Greek 
goddesses of Botticelli or Raffaelle. And these true idylls 
of Tennyson are delightful specimens of its resources and 
its beauties. 

CEnojie was a marvellous production of a youth only 
just of age ; and it still remains the most delightful of them 
all. Ulysses, but a few years later, had a deeper and 
grander strain, if it had fewer fancies and charms. And 
Tithomis, begun about the same time as Ulysses, is hardly 
inferior in form. It is astonishing that Tiresias, CEnone' s 
Death, and Demeter, separated from the early idylls by 
some fifty years, should retain as much of the early fire 
and music ; but it must be confessed that, to say the least, 
they add nothing to our enjoyment of these pieces. St. 
Simeon Stylites, Lucretius, Columbus, St. Telemac/ius, be- 
long to a rather different order of art. They are dramatic 
and reflective poems, like Wordsworth's Laodamia or 
Michael. Tennyson's pure idylls, of which CEnone is the 
gem, offer every perfection of his art, and are the form of 
poetry which best suits his genius. If they do not possess 
the magical simplicity of Theocritus at his highest, they 
have a dignity and thoughtfulness which place them above 
such popular and melodious pieces as those left to us by 
Bion and Moschus. 



30 TENNYSON 

ROMANCES AND ODES 

The mastery of Tennyson over philosophical argument 
and pictorial harmonies, and the force with which his mas- 
terpieces in meditative and in romantic verses haunt the 
memory, rather lead us to forget two other forms of art 
in which he is no less excellent. These are, first, the hu- 
morous, secondly the tragic. Few of his pieces are more 
popular than the Northern Farmer, and none more entirely 
deserves its immense vogue. We must say both forms of 
the NortJier7i Farmer, with their insight into the humours 
of rural boorishness, middle-class meanness, and their as- 
tonishing command of dialect. The poet's command over 
dialect, as shown in Oivd Roa, the Spinstei^'s Sweet-arts, 
in the Pi'omise of May, the NortJierji Cobbler, and again of 
the Irish dialect in To-7jiorrow, would be enough to estab- 
lish a reputation. For their local fidelity is as great as 
their phonetic ingenuity. These dialect poems, together 
with the amusing experiments in classical metres, are deci- 
sive evidence of the extraordinary ease with which Ten- 
nyson strikes from his lyre every note at will. And this 
command over every kind of metre was the result, not 
only of his natural genius for rhythm, but of close and 
unceasing study of prosody, as appears from constant an- 
ecdotes and judgments recorded in the Memoir by his son. 

The humour of the Northern Farmer, old and new, has 
created a type as familiar, and as likely to be enduring, as 
that of Pecksniff or Becky Sharp or Mrs. Poyser. The 
Vision of Sin was an early revelation of this power ; and 
it was shown as a rare but quite visible thread through the 
whole of his work, from The Sleeping Beauty down to The 
Foresters. Those who heard the poet talk with friends well 
knew the strain of robust humour which underlay all his 
intellect and his taste. Indeed, a countryman, entering 



TENNYSON 3 1 

into casual talk with him during a stroll, or at an inn, 
might for the first ten minutes have mistaken the poet for 
a rather rough-and-ready humourist. And the Memoir is 
full of examples how hearty a gift of humour lay beneath 
those sombre meditations and subtle modulations which 
are the familiar type of Tennyson's verse. 

Tennyson, it is often said, is not at his best in the ode. 
Neither of the odes to the Royal Princesses as brides have 
any particular value beyond an occasional line or phrase ; 
\.\\^ Jubilee Ode is a melancholy failure ; and the Exhibition 
Odes are not much of a success. But it is not fair to judge 
a poet by poems commanded of him as laureate on occa- 
sions of state. Homer would have been flat if Priam had 
commanded an ode for the wedding of Troilus and Cres- 
sida. Rut there was one ode in a far nobler strain. The 
Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington has, to my 
ears, a note which Tennyson rarely struck — a Doric note 
of heroic mode, with a breadth and masculine ring of the 
classical ode of triumph and lament. It is in many things 
the least Tennysonian of Tennyson's poems. It has his 
wonderful gift of imitative music, but it is the music of the 
funeral march as composed by Handel or Beethoven. I 
remember the ode being recited, when one who had been 
present at the burial in St. Paul's, having imperfectly 
heard the recitation, thought it was a recital of the music 
used at the funeral. The lines, ' Bury the great Duke,' 
* Let the long, long procession go,' and the whole of the 
three strophes with which the ode opens, are a magnifi- 
cent re-echoing in words of great funeral music : — 

'■ And let the mournful martial music blow, 
The last great Englishman is low.' 

The whole of these five strophes are worthy of the occa- 
sion, and contain lines and couplets which have passed into 



32 TENNYSON 

current use. But the thought with which the sixth opens, 
the abrupt cry of Nelson from his tomb beneath the dome : 
'Who is he that cometh like an honoured guest,' this, I 
hold, is one of the grandest conceptions in modern poetry. 
The suddenness of this burst from the spirit of our great- 
est seaman, who had slumbered in peace for half a century, 
its directness and its simplicity, reach the highest note of 
lyric imagination, and the extreme boldnt^ss of the idea is 
fully justified by the answer — 

' Mighty Seaman, this is he, 
Was great by land as thou by sea.' 

This is true poetry, Pindaric, natural, and thrilling, in 
simple words and devoid of any prettiness of imagery or 
subtlety of phrase. Tennyson's Works — nay, modern 
poetry have no nobler inspiration. 

However alien to his Muse it may be thought, Tenny- 
son from time to time would find themes of passion, hor- 
ror, and crime, when he matched himself with Shelley, 
Byron, and Coleridge in their darkest hours. These themes 
were not altogether akin to his temperament, and at times 
he wanted sting and realism for such grim work. But 
from the first he displayed his power in such a poem as 
The Sisters. Of course, this was the early Sisters — *We 
were two daughters of one race ' — for, oddly enough, in 
the collected Works, there are two poems of the same title, 
and the later Sisters is not a success at all. TJie Sisters 
of the early ballad is a grand and stirring peace, in imita- 
tion, no doubt, of the Twa Corbies or Helen of Kirkconnell, 
and would be fit to be placed beside these wonderful poems, 
had it been rather simpler, more reticent, with less of visi- 
ble artifice. But it is a fine example of the tragic ballad. 
Fati7na, again, has the true glow of Eastern passion — 



TENNYSON 33 

' O Love, O fire ! once he drew 
With one long kiss my whole soul thro' 
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.' 

It is curious that Tennyson's wonderful ear and subtle 
modulations occasionally played him false and betrayed 
him into a solecism of speech. Not to insist on the false 
rhyme of 'through' with *dew,' which involves the mis- 
pronunciation of 'dew' as 'do,' or of 'through' as 'threw,' 
the first of the cited lines involves a fault in prosody, or a 
mispronunciation of 'fire' as 'fi-er,' a dissyllable. This is 
really a cockneyism, and unfortunately it is one into which 
the poet's fondness for rusticity in speech occasionally led 
him. Even the exquisite line in The Lotos-Eaters is 
printed in all editions thus — 

' Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'^d eyes.' 

Here the prosody twice makes tir d a dissyllable, as if it 
were ' ti-er'd ' ! This is almost a vulgarism. Of course, the 
line should be written — 

' Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.' 

Thus, however softly the -ed is sounded, it would destroy 
the musical cadence of the verse. It is no doubt rare, but 
it is certain that Tennyson now and then makes a false 
rhyme, due to careless or defective enunciation, which in 
one so hyper-sensitive of words and so correct is singular. 
The most conspicuous instance of that is The Charge of 
tJie LigJit Brigade, where the word Juindred rhymes first 
with blimder d, as if it were pronounced Jiunderd, and then 
with tJutnder'd, zvoiiderd, and sundered. Yokels, no doubt, 
do say Jmnderd, but it should not be immortalised in seri- 
ous poetry. 

Tennyson's tragic, or rather melodramatic, romances are 
not usually so simple, direct, and yet mysterious as this 
c 



34 TENNYSON 

form of poetry demands, to have unqualified success, in 
spite of their beauty of form. The tragic romance of 
which the Twa Corbies is a perfect type must deal with 
naked terror, devoid of a single ornament. It must state 
the prime visible facts with absolute clearness and pre- 
cision ; it must not fill up the story, but leaves much in 
mystery and horror. Tennyson's essays in this most ex- 
acting art are somewhat too elaborate, with too many 
graces, and too little left obscure. The story is worked 
out rather too much in detail, and yet is not quite clear. 
One or other of these defects rather detracts from the 
value of such pieces as the Vision of Sin, The Victim, The 
Wrecks The Flight, To-morrow, and Forlorn. 

But there is one piece, and that a poem of his latest 
period, which is a perfect triumph in the style of grisly 
romance. RizpaJi has every quality which a poem of the 
class demands. The theme is entirely natural, dreadful, 
and yet historically true — indeed, the poem strictly fol- 
lows recorded facts. These gruesome facts it narrates 
with entire plainness, simplicity, and vividness. The 
story of the mother's agony, madness, and frantic clinging 
to the bones of her felon son — ' the bones that had sucked 
her, the bones that had moved in her side ' — is given with 
wonderful power. Altogether it is as weird and impres- 
sive as anything of the kind in our literature. And the 
passion and delirium of the mother's wail almost reconcile 
us to the unfortunate metre with sixteen syllables in each 
line. 

METRICAL SYSTEM AND DRAMAS 

This curious turn for enormously long lines seemed to 
grow on Tennyson with age. We all enjoyed the metre of 
Locksley Hall with its prosody of eight trochees, the last 
catalectic or cut short. But this familiar line of 15 sylla- 



TENNYSON 35 

bles is as long as English words can conveniently bear. 
RizpaJi is even longer. But TJie Wreck and Despair 
became fatiguing in the mob of syllables without a pause. 
The first line of Despair is — 

' Is it you that preach'd in the chapel there looking over the sand?' 

This is not poetry, with i6 syllables and 52 letters in the 
line. The first line of CJiarity is — 

< What am I doing, you say to me, wasting the sweet summer hours?' 
The first line of Kapiolani is — 

' When from the terrors of Nature a people have fashion'd and wor- 
ship a Spirit of Evil.' 

Here we have 23 syllables and 6Z letters. 

The first line of the Iliad has 16 syllables and 30 letters. 
The first line of Paradise Lost has 10 syllables and 34 
letters. A language like our own, with an abnormal pro- 
portion of consonants and unmusical syllables, is peculiarly 
unfit to endure the piling up of words in lines of verse. 

This proneness to metres of preposterous length grew 
on the poet with age, and became at last a tiresome man- 
nerism. None other of our poets had previously adopted 
it. But, unluckily, Tennyson set a fashion which in our 
day has been very prevalent. It is a fault in prosody 
which no other poetry but ours has committed ; and un- 
happily the English language, by its agglomeration of 
consonants and its often uncouth syllables, is peculiarly 
unfitted to submit to such a burden. 

Another peculiarity of Tennyson's verse is the excessive 
use in blank verse of monosyllables. There are passages 
of the Idylls of the King where monosyllabic lines are in 
the proportion of i in 4, and where lines of more than one 
polysyllable are only in the proportion of i in 4. There 



36 TENNYSON 

are whole passages where nothing is admitted but an 
occasional polysyllable, and line after line contains only 
one dissyllable and all the rest are monosyllables. 

Take the very fine passage in the death-wound of King- 
Arthur, TJie Passing of AriJinr, about line 150 — 

^Then spake the king : '• My house hath been my doom. 
But call not thou this traitor of my house 
Who hath but dwelt beneath one roof with me. 
My house are rather they who sware my vows, \ 

Yea, even while they break them, own'd me king. 
And well for thee, saying in my dark hour, 
When all the purport of my throne hath fail'd. 
That quick or dead thou holdest me for king. ' 

King am I, whatsoever be their cry : 
And one last act of kinghood shalt thou see 
Yet, ere I pass." And uttering this the king ; 

Made at the man ; then Modred smote his liege 
Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword 
Had beaten thin ; while Arthur at one blow, 
Striking the last stroke with Excalibur, 
Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.*' 

Here are sixteen lines. Out of these, twelve lines con- 
sist of monosyllables or of monosyllables with one single 
dissyllable. One other line has the weak polysyllable 
'whatsoever.' Only three lines out of the sixteen have 
more than one polysyllable. This of course is measuring 
by prosody, which makes ' uttering ' a trochee (— w). Two 
of the three lines with more than one polysyllable contain 
proper names. In the sixteen lines there are 130 mono- 
syllables and only 17 polysyllables, including the proper 
names. 

No one can deny that these are noble lines, nor that 
the use of Biblical monosyllables gives strength and so- 
lemnity to the verse. But when it grows into a studied 
system, it becomes a mannerism, almost an affectation. 



TEXNYSOX 37 

It is true that Milton c.irric^d to excess the use of poly- 
syllables. But how magnificent is the roll of those ma- 
jestic heroics — 

• Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world, and all our woe 
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.' 

and so on down to — 

" That to the height of this great argument 
I may assert eternal providence. 
And justify the ways of God to men.' 

In the first hundred lines of Paradise Lost there are 
only four lines of pure monosyllables, and only twenty-one 
lines with a single polysyllable. That is to say, whilst four- 
fifths of Milton's lines consist of more than one polysyl- 
lable, only one-fifth of Tennyson's are so constructed. 
Milton very rarely resorts to lines consisting solely of mono- 
syllables, though he knows how to use such prosody with 
errand effect, as in — 



& 



'Nor the deep tract of hell, say first what cause/ 

' If thou beest he ; but oh. how fallen ! how chang'd.' 

In that most magnificent prelude to the third book of 
Paradise Lost, the first hundred lines contain only four con- 
sisting of monosyllables ; and thepassage, one of the very 
grandest in the whole range of English poetry, contains a 
succession of lines rich in sonorous polysyllables — 

' Hail, Holy Light, offspring of heav'n first-born. 
Or of the Eternal Coeternal beam 
May I express thee unblam'd ? Since God is light. 
And never but in unapproached light 
Dwelt from eternity ; dwell then in thee, 
Bright effluence of brisfht essence increate.' 



38 TENNYSON 

In these six magnificent lines, all but one have each more 
than one polysyllable, and the exception has a word of four 
syllables. 

Such, too, is Shakespeare's practice, fond as he is of 
powerful monosyllabic lines. For instance, take the great 
speech of Mark Antony \x\ Jidiiis Ccesar — 

' O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth.' 

Here, in twenty-two lines, there is not a single monosyl- 
labic line. 

Compare Wordsworth's scheme of metre. Take the 
Lilies written above Tint em Abbey. In the first hundred 
and ten lines of this glorious poem, there are but two con- 
sisting of mere monosyllables, and the sonorous polysyl- 
lables are thrown broadcast through the whole poem — 

'His little, nameless, unremembered acts.' 
•^The still, sad music of humanity.' 
' Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.' 
' A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought.' 

Compare Coleridge's scheme of prosody. In his noble 
Hymn in the Vale of Chamouiiy (eighty-four lines) there 
are but three of simple monosyllables, and some of the 
grandest lines are composed of polysyllables — 

' Thy habitation from eternity ! ' 

' I worshipped the Invisible alone.' 

'Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in Earth? 

Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? 

Who made thee parent of perpetual streams ? ' 
' Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.' 

A careful comparison of Tennyson's blank verse with 
that of other great masters will show that he made it a 



TENNYSON 39 

deliberate system to resort to monosyllables ; and although 
he has certainly left us some lovely examples of lines rich 
in polysyllables, as a rule he reduced these to a minhnmn, 
so that monosyllabic lines at last became a mannerism. 
No man with an ear for poetry will deny the power and 
dignity of the monosyllabic line in the hands of a master. 
But when we feel that this had become a conscious or 
instinctive habit, and we have hundreds of lines in succes- 
sion with reiterated monosyllables, whilst a trisyllable or a 
quadrisyllable is admitted as a rare licence, the inevitable 
result is monotony. We feel the simple force of such 
lines as — 

'Gone thro' my sin to slay and to be slain.' 

' Then rose the king and moved his host by night.'' 

But there is an effect of staccato, as musicians call it, and 
we feel a richer melody in Wordsworth's — 

' The still, sad music of humanity.' 

or these of Milton — 

' Won from the void and formless infinite.' 
' Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, Pow'rs! ' 
' These are thy glorious works. Parent of good. 
Almighty, thine this universal frame.' 

In all the tens of thousands of Tennyson's lines of blank 
verse, he never once sounded this organ-note. 

A wonderful fact in Tennyson's career as a poet was 
the prolonged period of his productive power. It extended 
over no less than sixty-seven years (i 827-1 894), if we count 
in the last emendations of the revised Works, or to sixty- 
five years, if we limit it from the earliest to the latest 
poems. A period so great is almost without example, for 
it exceeds that of Wordsworth and of Victor Hugo. But, 
as so often happens with poetic products, the power of the 



40 TENNYSON 

later does not equal that of the earlier inspiration. If we 
divide the period of Tennyson's poetic activity into two 
halves, it is obvious that the first half — say, from 1830 to 
i860 — contains his most important and permanent work. 
Within this period fall the most familiar Lyrics, The 
Princess (1847), /;/ Menioriam (1850), Ode on the Duke of 
Wellington (1852), Mand (1855), Idylls of the King (first 
series, 1859). We cannot count the later Idylls, the con- 
tinuation poems, and the later Ballads, as having the 
power or the vitality of the great typical triumphs of the 
poet. At the publication of the first Idylls of the King 
(1859), Tennyson was fifty years old, and he had reached 
his zenith. 

For this reason, it is not necessary to discuss the 
Dramas. They were all published at a late period of life ; 
and their most salient quality is that they were the work 
of the poet's old age. Queen Mary, the earliest of them, 
w^as published in 1875, when the poet was in his sixty- 
sixth year ; Becket, the most successful of them, was 
printed (but not published) in 1879; ^^^ The Foresters 
was not produced until 1892, when the poet was in his 
eighty-third year. The four English historical dramas 
are all finely studied and worked out with that mastery of 
poetic form and that dignity of conception which Tenny- 
son brought to all his work. They will always have great 
interest for the students of English literature, and for the 
lovers of our laureate's art. In an age which had more 
taste for the higher drama, and less passion for prurient 
melodrama, they might be seen on the stage more often 
than they are. Some day it is possible that Becket, as an 
historical drama, and The Foresters, as a scenic operetta, 
may be adapted by a modern playwright, and heard with 
pleasure by a cultivated audience. But the seven dramas, 
taken as a whole, add nothing to the enduring place in our 



TENNYSON 4 1 

/ poetic roll which Tennyson will hold ; nor would it in- 
crease the honor we pay to his genius, were we to discuss 
the dramas in detail, or insist on their public performance. 



PLACE IN ENGLISH POETRY 

It is not reasonable, nor is it fair, to compare Tennyson 
with Milton ; and it is not reasonable to compare Tenny- 
son with any poet whatever. We leave it to undergradu- 
ates, all agog about their honours, to concoct class-lists 
of the poets, and to give marks : from Shakespeare with 
a maximum^ or 'highest possible,' down to the laureate of 
the day. Those who love poetry love all fine poets in turn. 
And Tennyson is a fine poet. His great gift is in lyric, 
in exquisite melody, in chastened perfection of phrase, in 
pathetic reflection and a certain metaphysical musing. 
Viewing his work as a whole, his most ardent admirers feel 
that in him form dominates the imagination ; his fancy is 
even greater than his originality ; he is more the artist 
than the thinker. No man can be a poet at all without 
fine form, nor without fancy ; and unless he be the artist 
first, he cannot be poet. But for all this imagination, 
originality, intellect, — all in supreme degree, — are the 
essence of the poet of the first order. 

The paramount influence of Tennyson, like that of 
Homer in the old world, of Raffaelle in painting, of Pope 
in the verse, and Johnson in the prose of the last century, 
has no doubt exerted a somewhat weakening influence 
over his immediate contemporaries. The conspicuous and 
surpassing quality of Tennyson was his dainty felicity of 
phrase, his faultless chiselling, and his imperturbable re- 
finement. Now these are just the qualities which an age 
of literary culture, specially trained in the study of lan- 
guage, found most readily imitable, and men fell to imi- 



42 TENNYSON 

tating it with all the zeal that a scholar feels in imitating 
Virgil and Ovid. The result was that hundreds of men 
and women took to inditing, and most of them to publish- 
ing, Tennysonian lyrics and idylls, quite as much like In 
Menioriam, Mat/d, and CEnone as college exercises are like 
the Georgics and the Heroides. Tennyson's overpowering 
fame and influence spread abroad the idea that poems 
were made by faultless phrasing, and that conception was 
a detail. Poeta JiascitJLV 7ion fit. But they would have it 
that fine poems could be concocted by an artful manipula- 
tion of the most choice language. And indeed, even in 
the Master himself, there is at times a suggestion, a 
reminiscence, of the wonders achieved by the glorified 
Latin verses of a consummate scholar. 

Poeta nascitur, et fit, was Tennyson's very happy and 
true epigram. The profoundly interesting Memoir by his 
son (all the more interesting that it is largely the poet's 
own autobiography, together with anecdotes and reminis- 
cences collected by his family and friends) shows us at 
every step how laborious a student of the arcana of all 
forms of poetry was Tennyson, and also how unerring was 
his own judgment about his work and that of others. 
Nothing that could tend to perfect poetic expression did 
Tennyson neglect or undervalue. Of all the pieces which 
are now given to the public for the first time in the Memoir, 
as having been omitted or condemned by the poet, there is 
not one of which his judicious lovers will regret the omis- 
sion from the collected Works. Few poets have been 
quite good judges of their own work, but Tennyson seemed 
to have an unerring critical faculty. No doubt his impec- 
cable taste, his faultlessness, somewhat detract from his 
greatness as a poet. Andrea del Sarto was called the 
maestro senza errore. And we feel that, with all his charm, 
Andrea at times becomes almost cloying with his serene 



TENNYSON 43 

perfection, his unfailing dolcezza. Tennyson, too, is the 
maestro senza errore. He is almost too faultless, too com- 
pletely master of himself, with too refined a taste and too 
elaborate a training. 

Raffaelle and Andrea del Sarto were terrible snares to 
the academies. Clever students could catch something 
of their elegance, their correct drawing, their harmony of 
composition, and it ended in the classicalities of Guido, 
Poussin, and the Caracci. And it is because the imitatiojt 
of Tennyson is a plausible and prevalent foible of poetic 
aspirants, that it becomes a duty of serious judges to speak 
of Tennyson's strength and of his weakness more openly 
than it has been usual to speak. The academic Osrics of 
our day, carried away by the almost Virgilian felicity of 
Tennyson's diction, are too apt to cheapen Byron, Words- 
worth, and Shelley, who have all of them committed stuff that 
is almost bungler's work, if compared withthe workmanship 
of In Memoriam. Byron, it is true, would slide into slov- 
enly rhetoric when his bad days came on ; he made slips 
in his grammar, and solecisms of speech which would scan- 
dalise a High-school girl ; and he hardly ever wrote twenty 
consecutive verses without a forced rhyme or some com- 
monplace. Wordsworth was capable of goody-goody drivel 
and egregious prosing ; and as Matthew Arnold said, the 
most ardent Wordsworthians are ready to pass by whole 
pages of poems unremembered and unread. And Shelley, 
though he was not, as the same critic tells us, 'an ineffec- 
tual Angel,' does undoubtedly soar up into transcendental 
empyreans where we quite lose sight of him, as we do 
when we watch a balloon mounting into the mists. Tenny- 
son, of course, never descends to vulgarisms, commonplace, 
or mystification. But, for all that, it does not follow that 
he is a far greater poet than Byron, Shelley, or Words- 
worth. 



44 TENNYSON 

Byron, Shelley, or Wordsworth, each in different ways, 
stirred and shook men's minds and coloured the whole 
mental atmosphere of their generation. Byron, with all 
his weakness and all his evil, was, as Goethe saw, the most 
imposing personality in English literature of his own gen- 
eration. Even if we were to admit that he was but a slov- 
enly poet, he was a great genius : a Titan in that union of 
energy and intellect which imposes ideas on an age and 
creates new imaginative worlds. The proof is that his 
influence on other nations has been greater than that of 
any poet of this century, or even of the last. Byron is 
one of the very few poets who have wielded a power over 
the mind of entire Europe ; and both Goethe, Scott, Man- 
zoni, and Victor Hugo owed their power to their prose 
as well as their verse. Whole generations, and many 
nations which never heard of Tennyson, Wordsworth, or 
Shelley, are familiar with Byron, and have been influenced 
by Byron. And it is a paradox to assert that one whose 
poetry has profoundly influenced modern society is to be 
denied the name of a true poet, because he often wrote 
scrambling and slovenly lines. The essence of poetry is 
potent and original imagination — the note which dwells 
on the memory and colours the life of men. 

Wordsworth, again, has certainly given a new tone to 
the thoughts and feeling of Englishmen. Nature wears to 
us a new aspect, speaks to the heart with a new power, 
ever since Wordsworth wrote. And Shelley has carried 
this worship of nature into a kind of pantheism which has 
influence over minds such as Wordsworth does not wholly 
satisfy and fill. Since Shelley gave to this century his 
immortal descants, the lovers of the higher poetry, a faith- 
ful few it may be, have had opened to them from the tur- 
moil of this age a new heaven and a new earth. 

It would be too much to claim for Tennyson any such 

I ofC 



TENNYSON 45 

European influence as that of Byron, or the creative origi- 
nality of Wordsworth or Shelley. Byron, Wordsworth, 
and Shelley were all fired with moral and social ideas 
which they preached and flung, or even stormed out, to 
their generation. Right or wrong, wholesome or morbid, 
these ideas filled them and their poems, and have to some 
degree moulded the thoughts of men, sometimes even by 
reaction and repulsion. There is something of the prophet 
and the reformer about them all ; they dealt with the prob- 
lems of the moral and social life of their age, the political 
and ethical evangels of an age of storm and change. That 
they were often wrong-headed, Utopian, even mischievous, 
is true. But their imagination played very largely round 
the causes, the ideals, the dilemmas which shook society 
around them, and, in a certain degree, in new forms shake 
us all to-day. Tennyson did this with far less conviction 
and with no such power. He meditated in exquisite ca- 
dences about death, futurity, creation, but in a rather hesi- 
tating spirit, and with most musical insistence on the 'faith 
in honest doubt.' But he held aloof in a somewhat detached 
position from the great social seethings of his age. He 
lay beside the nectar of his lovely melodies, and his bolts 
were hurled far below him in the valleys where men moil 
and fight. Honest doubt and faint trust in the larger 
hope are often soothing, even soporific and beautiful, but 
they do not make a new epoch in poetry or thought. 

The only national and social causes into which Tenny- 
son ever flung his whole heart were the modern fad of Im- 
perialism and the glorification of British arms. The 
expansion of empire, Indian and African battues, are suffi- 
ciently popular with the public to do without poetic stimu- 
lus — 71CC carent vate sacro. They have their own Tyrtaeus, 
whose odes are sung to the accompaniment of a brass band. 
Such ballads ring most untunefully in the lofty music of 



46 TENNYSON 

English literature, and they enter into unworthy competi- 
tion with the sensations provided for us by the daily press. 
It is not of course any question of political differences. A 
real lover of high poetry, whatever his politics, were he 
the veriest * little Englander ' or Quaker, can take delight 
in the martial enthusiasm of Scott, the patriotics of Burns, 
the war-songs of Campbell — those were indeed times to 
stir a poet's fire — and he takes delight in Manzoni's Cmqiie 
Maggio, or in Tennyson's Ode on the Burial of the Dicke of 
Wellington. Poetry is its own justification, and is no thing 
of parties or politics. And all poetry that rises into the 
upper air of the eternal realities, stands above all contro- 
versy, passion, or prejudice. 

But when our poet descends into the arena of party po- 
lemics, in such things as 'Riflemen, Form,' 'Hands all 
Round,' 'The Third of February, 1852,' 'The Fleet,' and 
other topical pieces dear to the Jingo soul, it is not poetry 
but journalism. And journalists' poetry should be left to 
such rhymesters as those who, like the Poet Laureate of 
our empire, and the Poet Laureate of Tommy Atkins, fill 
the columns of the newspapers when the vulgar are seized 
with a war-fit or a scare. 

But Tennyson, though much of his work is no doubt 
destined to be shed in the course of time, as is so much of 
all workers except the very greatest, has stamped his name 
for ever on English literature as the poet, the one domi- 
nant poet of the long Victorian era, and as one of the chief 
lyrists in the whole of our poetic roll. He is destined to 
share with Milton the crown of consummate mastery of 
poetic diction. As a poet of nature he stands beside By- 
ron, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Byron is the poet 
of mountains and oceans, Shelley of clouds and air, Keats 
of the perfume of the evening, Wordsworth of the meaning 
and mysteries of nature as whole. And so Tennyson is 



TENNYSON 



47 



the poet of flowers, trees, and birds. Of flowers and trees 
he must be held to be the supreme master, above all who 
if have written in English, perhaps indeed in any poetry. 
The meanest flower that blows does not inspire in Tenny- 
son thoughts so deep as it did to Wordsworth, but Tenny- 
son has painted them all — flowers, wild and cultivated, 
trees, herbs, woods, downs, and moors — with the magic of 
a Turner. He spoke of trees and flowers, from the cedar 
of Lebanon to the hyssop that groweth on the wall. As 
flowers, hills, trees, and rivers uttered to Wordsworth a 
new moral Decalogue, so they seemed to Tennyson, as they 
did to Turner, radiant with a fanciful beauty which no man 
had seen before. If we cannot claim for Tennyson the 
supreme place of a poet of man's destinies, or as one of the 
creative masters of our literature, he has for ever clothed 
the softer aspects of the world of man and nature with a 
garment of delicate fancy and of pure light. 



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